With over 12,000 students and 60,000 alumni, Lehman College serves as a cultural, intellectual and economic centre for The Bronx.
The College began using MediaCore in 2012 after seeking a solution to enable students and faculty to upload, access and share all of their videos in one place – anytime, anywhere and on any device. Today, Lehman College uses MediaCore to share a variety of media content across campus.

The Challenge

Before using MediaCore, Lehman College struggled with a challenge familiar to many colleges and universities: They owned and produced a large amount of video and media content, but had no centralized location to organize and store it.

An initial attempt to store media across several platforms including YouTube, Vimeo and Blackboard simply made finding specific content a challenge for students and faculty. As the College continued to rapidly produce new content ranging from educational videos – such as captured lectures and presentations – to coverage of college events and festivals, having some way to catalogue and tag media became vital.

The quality of uploads was also important; Lehman’s 28,000 sq. ft. Multimedia Centre is a state-of-the-art, professional production facility. Naturally, all content is produced in high definition to professional quality standards, making it imperative that there be no loss of quality when videos were uploaded and encoded for playback online.

It became clear that Lehman required a dedicated, easy-to-use platform capable of categorizing, tagging and storing all of their high definition media in one central location.

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The Solution

Lehman chose MediaCore because of its Collection structure and flexible tagging capabilities which, together, enabled easy organization of a large amount of media. The ability to upload and process all of their high-definition content without any perceivable loss in quality was also a key factor.

Lehman chose MediaCore because its Collection structure and flexible tagging system enabled easy organization of a large, and ever-growing, library of media. The ability to upload and process all of their high-definition content without any perceivable loss in quality was also hugely valuable.

MediaCore also gave Lehman the ability to manage access rights so that faculty could easily share media with specific groups of users and keep any sensitive information private for administrators. “Everything is quick and easy now. Especially the uploading of content such as our annual commencement video, which is time-sensitive and needed to be shared the next day.” said Brendan McGibney, the College’s Technical Director.

Brendan noted that keeping things simple and secure was also vital; “The most important part of the implementation was the ability to use a secure single sign-on solution. This allows students to sign in to MediaCore using their existing college email address and password. This helps to encourage usage, avoids confusion with passwords and is easier for the IT department to manage.”

Now that video content is easier to upload, share and manage more teachers and students are getting involved than ever, “MediaCore is a fantastic platform for video-based learning and we’ve received positive feedback from both students and faculty” added Brendan.

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Next Steps

Now that most of their existing media has been uploaded and cataloged, Brendan and his team are working hard to provide faculty with the ability to record and share lectures to enable students to watch and re-watch classes as many times as they wish.

Cattura – a lecture capture device integrated with MediaCore – will be used to record, capture and encode content in real time, enabling students to access the material soon after it has been recorded. Lehman also plans to host PDFs as associated files in addition to audio files, podcasts and photography on Digital Connect.

Written By Aidan Hornsby

Aidan is a designer and filmmaker. He likes tea, technology and travelling, and is passionate about how video can transform teaching and learning.